On Monday, President Obama announced a new six-year plan for infrastructure spending with an initial $50 billion investment and prepared new business tax cuts including a proposal that companies be allowed to write off 100% of their new investment in plants and equipment through 2011. The infrastructure rebuilding would include 150,000 miles of refurbished roads, 4,000 miles of high-speed rail and 150 miles of airport runway, along with advances in air-traffic control technology. The tax break would be retroactive to Sept. 8, the day of its announcement, so businesses won’t delay planned investments while waiting for congressional action. It would extend to Dec. 31, 2011.

In August the U.S. economy lost 54,000 non-farm jobs according to the Labor Department. This is a slower decline than economists anticipated as the health-care and temporary-staffing industries led a 67,000 job expansion in private-sector employment. The payroll count in June and July was revised 123,000 higher. Over the month, government employment fell by 121,000, largely reflecting the loss of 114,000 temporary workers hired for Census 2010. The number of temporary Census workers peaked in May at 564,000 but has declined to 82,000 in August. Total private employment continued up modestly to 67,000 for the month. Since its most recent low in December 2009, private-sector employment has risen by 763,000. From May through August, the jobless rate remained in the range of 9.5 to 9.7 percent.

The Commerce Department announced that new home sales fell 12.4 percent in July from a month earlier to a seasonally adjusted annual sales pace of 276,600. That is the slowest pace since 1963, and the past three months have been the worst on record for new home sales.

On average, each new home built creates the equivalent of three jobs for a year and generates about $90,000 in taxes, according to the National Association of Home Builders. “If new homes aren’t selling, there’s no incentive to build more,” said Nigel Gault, Chief Economist at IHS Global Insight. More than 600,000 new homes were sold each year from 1983 through 2007. Sales dropped to 375,000 homes last year, which is the weakest yearly total on record. Builders have sharply scaled back construction in the face of weak sales. The number of new homes up for sale at the end of July was unchanged at 210,000, the lowest level in about 40 years. Due to the slow sales pace, it would still take more than nine months to exhaust the excess supply; that is above a healthy level of about six months. The median sales price was also down in July to $204,000, which is 4.8 percent lower then last year and down 6 percent from June.